From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jul 4 6:13: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from matrix.buckhorn.net (matrix.buckhorn.net [208.129.165.68]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1688337B8F1; Tue, 4 Jul 2000 06:13:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bob@buckhorn.net) Received: from buckhorn.net (nebula.buckhorn.net [208.129.165.66]) by matrix.buckhorn.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA96801; Tue, 4 Jul 2000 08:10:12 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from bob@buckhorn.net) Message-ID: <3961E2D8.F0CD6775@buckhorn.net> Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 08:12:56 -0500 From: Bob Martin Organization: InterNet Unlimited X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: John Baldwin Cc: FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: install fails on 10.2 GB drive using 4.0 References: <200007040641.XAA37722@john.baldwin.cx> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG John Baldwin wrote: > > That means the MBR has some wacky geometry in it. If you could boot > into the install and use the live filesystem CD fixit option and then > run fdisk on the drive in question (e.g., 'fdisk ad0'), the output > could be rather helpful in figuring out where sysinstall is getting > confused. > > -- > > John Baldwin -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ > PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc > "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ John, The bios gets the drive geometery correct, but on a virgin drive with no master boot record, FreeBSD 4.0 will fail as described. I don't have the exact message from the debug screen, but it was basically:Can't write label. Partition can't extend past cylinder 1024. It then give an 8 digit number for the number of cylinders. The numbers where sane in both the fdisk and disklable portions of sysinstall. It wasn't until the write happened that it failed. Manually installing the label will solve the problem. The problem doesn't affect 3.2, 3.3 or 5.0, or Windows9x, all of which load without any problem. I have also loaded 4.0 on 33gb drives without any problems. If you think this problem is serious enough to warrent it, we can probably be talked in to reloading our system so that we can get exact diagnostics. (Anything within reason for the cause 8) Bob -- "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message